


Old Ghosts

by QuokkaMocha



Category: UFO | Gerry Anderson's UFO
Genre: Aliens, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Cold Case - Freeform, England (Country), Forensics, Gen, Minor Violence, Murder, Murder Mystery, Mystery, Original Character Death(s), Threats of Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:54:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24955654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuokkaMocha/pseuds/QuokkaMocha
Summary: In 1965, just before his village was drowned to create a reservoir for the big cities of the Midlands, Alec Freeman's wife Jane and their two children disappeared. No trace was ever found of them. Fifteen years later, an archaeological dig in the area uncovers part of an alien artefact. SHADO are called in, and Freeman insists on going, sure that the aliens were responsible for his family's disappearance. When the dig subsequently finds human remains, however, it seems there might be a more terrestrial explanation, and Freeman finds himself the main suspect.
Relationships: Alec Freeman/Other(s), Paul Foster/Original Character
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	Old Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> This story was originally published on the SHADO Library website, many years ago, under my real name. This version, however, has been edited to (hopefully) improve the quality of the writing, now that I'm a lot more experience, and so will be slightly different to that original version. The story is therefore complete, but I'll upload a chapter a week.

**Chapter One**

_7 th February 1965_

_Some Enchanted Evening_ crackled on the radio as the army jeep crunched to a halt in the driveway.The headlamps turned thetrees lining the front garden a skeletal white and lit up the façade of the seventeenth century half-timber cottage like a spotlight at a _son et lumière_. Then the driver killed the engine and the lights. The house became a ghost of its former self, only visible thanks to the full, chalky moon gazing down over the trees.As the driver left the jeep, the wind picked up and caused the trees to shiver and scratch at the face of that moon.The driver headed quickly for the front porch, eager to get out of the bitter February night. In the near-midnight stillness, he heard the same song continue, this time playing on the radio in the kitchen, whose window glowed like a square of liquid gold in the darkness ahead.

Alec Freeman stood for a while in the hallway of his house and breathed in the smell of gravy, that had to be the remains of his dinner. His stomach rumbled and for the first time since he’d left the base, his body began to ache with the strain of being on the move and on his feet all day. He crept towards the kitchen door, listened for a moment and heard dishes clattering in the sink, the rush of water from the tap, and Jane’s brisk footsteps on the flagstone floor. He rapped lightly on the door and stepped inside, giving a sheepish smile that would’ve been more at home on a schoolboy heading into the headmaster’s office than on a corporal of the British Army.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘The CO thought he saw lights in the woods and had everyone out searching for intruders. Turned out to be some local fellow after rabbits.’

Jane dropped a plate into the sink with a loud clatter and with little care.

‘It’s fine,’ she replied, her tone clipped. So she was mad at him. She reached over the top of the sink and turned the knob on the buff plastic radio, just as the crackly baritone reached the last few bars of the song. At once, the stillness of the countryside rushed in to fill the house.They were ten minutes’ walk from the rest of the village and swaddled in thick woodland, so there was no traffic noise, no lights from other houses. They might have easily been the only living creatures in the world.

“You look nice,” Freeman commented, knowing how pathetic that sounded, but she genuinely did look pretty.“New dress?”

‘Melda and I went into Langport. It wasn’t that expensive.’

‘It’s lovely. Suits you.’ He sighed and put his arms around her, then leaned in close and breathed in the perfume of her jet-black hair. ‘I am sorry, Jane. I was all set to leave when the nonsense started. And it won’t always be like this. That promotion…’

She turned and for a moment he thought she would shout at him, unleash a barrage of insults and complaints. He saw them pent up behind her brown eyes. But then she sagged, shook her head, and pulled away.

‘Yes it will, Alec. Promotion or no promotion, you’ll always have ‘nonsense’ to deal with. There’s no point in either of us denying it.’

She went over to the oven and pulled out a glass casserole dish, which she set down on a woven mat on the red Formica-topped table.

‘The kids have had theirs,’ she said. ‘They wanted to wait but I sent them to bed. They’ve got school tomorrow.’

‘I’ll look in on them in a minute,’ Freeman said.

‘You remember Martin’s teacher wants to see us this Friday?’

He hadn’t remembered that, until Jane mentioned it, but lied and said he did.

‘And will you be there?’ she asked.

He tried a smile, the sort of expression that used to charm her when they were first courting, but she’d grown immune to it now. She returned to the sink, and with a shudder he thought she might be about to cry, but then he realised from the angle of her gaze that she was watching his reflection in the window.

‘I said I’d help Melda move house tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We bought a few things in town. Most of the furniture’s already been shifted out of her own place, but she could still do with a few things. I’m surprised we managed to find a van for hire though, with everything going on.’

‘Well, with everyone having to move,’ said Freeman. ‘Old Joe and his boys’ll be worked off their feet. For once in their lives. Must be raking it in.’

‘Strange to think,’ said Jane, staring absently now at the darkness beyond the window. ‘The whole village, hundreds of years of history, all drowned in a matter of days, just so a few idiots in Birmingham can make a cup of tea. Can you imagine if they suggested flooding Birmingham just so we could have better water supplies down here?’

‘Flooding Birmingham’s probably the best thing you could do to the place.’

He watched her to see if she would thaw a little and laugh, but Jane stood straighter than the new recruits on parade.

‘Switch the light off, Alec,’ she said in a whisper.

‘What? I was going to have my dinner.’

‘I think those kids are out there again. I saw a light.’

‘Not you as well,’ Freeman muttered, but he got up and went over to the light switch. Once the room was in darkness, Jane’s reflection on the window disappeared, and the moonlit driveway and the woods beyond appeared. Freeman wandered to his wife’s side and peered out. He drew the breath to tell her she was imagining things, when he saw it himself. A single flash, quick and bright, somewhere amongst the trees.

‘They’re probably setting off fireworks again,’ he said. ‘Bloody idiots’ll likely do more harm to themselves than anyone else.’

‘What if they set fire to something?’ Jane said, wrapping her arms around herself as if she was cold. ‘I don’t like them being this close to the house. They’re thugs. And they scare the kids. That’s if they’re not tramping through the garden, or stealing stuff from the vegetable patch…’

‘All right,’ Freeman said with a sigh. ‘I’ll go and scare them off.’

‘They think they own the bloody world,’ said Jane. ‘I’m sick of them using that garden as a shortcut to the village.’

‘Well, that’s not going to be a problem soon, is it?’

Freeman returned to the hall and retrieved the heavy coat he’d only just hung up on the hook by the door, then grabbed the industrial torch they kept stored beneath the coat rack for emergencies and power cuts. Before he stepped outside into the cold, he gave his hip a light pat, just to reassure himself that he still had his service revolver on his belt.

***

Jane watched her husband stride down the driveway, the beam of his torch licking around the trees at the edge of the woods. A few seconds later, the darkness swallowed him up. She played with her hair, a nervous gesture she’d had since she was little, and tried to quell the churning, almost painful cramps in her stomach. She hated having secrets, and she hated this unhappiness that weighed her down every day. It hadn’t been like that when she was first married. Everything had been exciting then, even the mundane tasks of the day, because it was all part of her new life. Nothing had changed, exactly. Freeman was the same man she had married, and she’d known about his commitment to his job from the beginning. The army lads from the base all hung around the pub in town, often in uniform, so the local girls knew exactly what they were getting if they chose to go and flirt with one of them. But these last few months, ever since the council had announced the evacuation of the village, she’d had the constant feeling that something was wrong, though she was never quite sure what was causing it.

Freeman had been gone a while. The cramps became a full-blown stomach ache and she paced around the kitchen, wondering if she should call someone. But who? The base commander? And what would she say? That her husband, a trained soldier, had gone out to shout at some yobs and hadn’t come back? Did she really think he couldn’t handle himself against a bunch of teenagers?

She told herself to stop being stupid and switched on the kettle. A cup of tea would take her mind off things and calm her down, though as she waited for the water to boil, she spotted another flash amongst the trees.

‘Bloody kids,’ she muttered.

A faint creak sounded behind her and she turned, fixing her attention on the old flight of stairs that lay just outside the kitchen door in the hallway. They were dilapidated, wooden things, stained dark and worn concave by centuries of feet. They’d been built in the days of the Civil War, so they often groaned and creaked to themselves but this had sounded heavier than the usual noises of the house settling. Jane glanced around for a ready weapon and found a rolling pin. Cliché, she thought, but it’d still give one of those yobs a bloody good headache if one of them had broken in. The grandfather clock in the hall chopped away the seconds. The wind moaned down the flue. Jane approached the stairs, looking up into the shadows of the landing above.

The wood creaked again. Jane held her breath and waited. Of course, the kids’ rooms were upstairs. It was entirely possible that Martin or Tessa had got up, maybe hearing their father’s voice, but something in Jane’s instincts said that wasn’t the case. She closed her eyes, feeling sick, but she swallowed down the nausea and forced herself to climb the stairs.

The lights in the upstairs hall were out, so the landing was in absolute darkness. As Jane approached, taking each step with painful slowness to try and keep her movements silent, she began to sense the person standing there. She knew she should call out, remind whoever it was that her husband was a soldier and he’d be back any moment, but she couldn’t bring herself to speak. Breaking the silence felt like the most dangerous thing she could do.

There were feet on the landing. She made out the gleam of polished shoes, catching the light that spilled from downstairs. Jane froze, shaking so hard she had to grasp the rolling pin with both hands to stop it waving around. She should go downstairs, she told herself. The phone was on the table in the hall. Go down and dial 999.

A hand landed on her shoulder.Hot breath reached her ear.

‘ _Once you have found her, never let her go...’_ it whispered.


End file.
